The San Ramon Valley Democratic Club is pleased to welcome Dr. David Jefferson from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories to speak about internet voting. Over the last 15 years we have moved from mechanical and electromechanical voting machines, to widespread vote-by-mail and computerized touchscreen voting machines, and to experiments with online and mobile voting. The most controversial of these is the last, the proposed introduction of online and mobile voting.

Security experts are virtually unanimous that online voting is not secure, and cannot be made so by any known means any time soon. Dr. Jefferson will describe the security issues in layman’s terms by comparing online voting to online commerce. Many people wonder if it is safe to shop online, why is it not safe to vote online. He will answer that question, and discuss some of the most profound issues in cybersecurity that vex us today and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Dr. David Jefferson is a computer scientist who has been active in research at the intersection of the computing and public elections for well over twenty years. In 1999 he served as technical committee chair of California Secretary of State Bill Jones’ Task Force on Internet Voting, whose report was the first major study of the subject ever published. In 2003 he was a member of Secretary of State’s Task Force on Touchscreen Voting, whose recommendations led eventually to voter verified audit trails for electronic voting machines in California and other states.

Dr. Jefferson was also coauthor of the SERVE Security Report (servesecurityreport.org), which detailed the security vulnerabilities in the Defense Department’s proposed Internet voting system in 2004 and led to the cancellation of the program. Under Secretary of State Debra Bowen he served as chair of the Post-Election Audit Standards Working Group which recommended risk limiting audits as the gold standard of election verification.

He serves on the Board of Directors of both the California Voter Foundation (www.calvoter.org) and VerifiedVoting (www.verifiedvoting.org), two nonprofit, nonpartisan organizations promoting open, secure, and verifiable election technology.

Dr. Jefferson holds a B.S. in Mathematics from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He works as a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he conducts research on supercomputing applications related to national security.

Please join us at 6:15 pm to talk about the latest political news or to just socialize and have fun.